To start out my week, my mom came home wednesday with a bag and when she opened it and inside there were 5 whole fish! Her friend is a fisherman and knows I like to eat fish so he caught some special for me. How she cleaned them up was not with a knife, but with a pair of scissors. She took the pair of scissors and just cut off the heads and then ripped the spine out of the back. It was fun to help her prep the fish and it tasted extraordinary with some garlic, oil and salt. Very simple. Very tasty. I believe it was Mackerol.
So Friday we went on an excursion to Bayona, France and Hondarribia, Spain with school. Bayona is the capital of the Pais Vasco of France. To expand on that I live in an autonomous area of Spain where they still speak their own language Euskara and this area in France is part of that same autonomous region. By autonomous region I mean that they still have their own government separate of Spain. Many of the "socialistas" wish to keep this area as separate from Spain as they can. Thats why the ETA continues to bomb places that represent corporate Spain. Many people hated the idea of the Guggenheim coming into Bilbao because it would make the area too touristy. But that is a whole different area. So Bayona was my first time in France. It was really funny because I would try and speak Spanish to people completely forgetting that they spoke French. We visited a huge church called "La Catedral de Santa Maria" and walked around the area. We tried some delicious chocolate and had a crepe....very stereotypical I know but it was awesome. It was a beautiful city right on a river and it was really cool to see all French all over the place. After the France part, we went back into Spain for lunch. We ate at a traditional cider house. A cider house brews their own traditional liquor and we all tried it. It came out of these huge wooden barrels that were installed in the walls. The liquor tasted like nothing I have ever tasted before. It tasted like a weaker whiskey mixed with a ton of wood. I enjoyed it, but a lot of people didn't. We then had some paella and for a main course fish. After lunch we went to Hondarribia which was an extremely small fishing town on the ocean. I wasn't too thrilled with it, but that could be because it was raining. After the excursion we got back to the bus station just in time to leave for Luz Ardiden, France. The Pirinese Mountains are the huge mountain range in the north that is a natural border for Spain and France. They are the best skiing you can get. When we booked the trip I looked up the place and I was a little worried because it had like 6 chairlifts and did not look too big. When we got on to the bus we were the only American kids, the rest were Spanish, so I knew I booked a good trip. I talked to the bus driver for the first part of the ride and he explained that yea this place wasn't big, but it was tall. I didn't quite understand what he was talking about. He was a really nice guy to talk to his name was Manu. So 4 and a half hours later at about 1 AM we arrived at our place to stay. Even at night you could see the huge mountains surrounding us and there was about a foot of snow on the ground!!! We pack 6 people into a place that should sleep like 3 people and wake up 6 hours later to go snowboard! We get on the bus to go get our gear and stop at a market where some lady starts questioning me in French. She must have understood I had no idea what was going on cause she stopped trying and walked away. We then headed towards the mountain. That was the scariest drive I have ever seen a coach bus do. Tons of hairpin turns, cars stopped in the road putting on tire chains......it was nuts. We finally reached the mountain and headed up the chairlift. We got there at about 9:30. The Sun was shining bright and the skies were the darkest blue I have ever seen in my life. So we get up the chairlift and take off as a group of 6 down our first run. It was amazing, such nice snow. We get down and I am already sweating. I had on a hoody and my northface and it was too much. The cool part about this place was that nothing was blocked off and the whole mountain was basically yours. We were going down parts where no other person had gone. So much powder snow that when you turned quick it shot up 10 feet in the air. There was one point I had to take off my board and I took a step and was knee deep in snow. As the day went on the "clouds" rolled in. I say clouds because this was not a fog. We were literally in the clouds. As the clouds rolled in we kept snowboarding. The mountain cleared out because you could only see like 10 feet in front of you. I am not being overly dramatic with this. Literally 10 feet. We were on the chairlift and you could BARELY see one seat ahead of you. We were snowboarding down the hills and with our group of six we had no idea where we were going. We would go only in the direction of down. Literally our conversations would go like this "Where are we?.....Where are we going?.....I don't know down is this way so lets go this way...." So that went on for an hour or so as the clouds cleared out it was time to head back. We got back on the bus and went to the town for a little dinner and to buy groceries for the next day. We had a nice sandwich and sat outside staring at the mountains. We then went back and had a beer and literally went to bed. We were all completely dead tired. Sunday morning I woke up with a sun burnt face. I put on some SPF 15 lotion and headed out for another day on the mountain. We tried soo hard Saturday to keep the group together spending a lot of time waiting for the girls and whatnot. So Sunday we decided to do our own things. Us guys put on our Ipods and just boarded together for awhile, when we got split up. We already said instead of waiting that we should just go on. The mountain was too big to wait for eachother or find eachother when getting lost. So about an hour into it I was split up from the rest of the guys. I was on my own with my Ipod snowboarding and it was probably my favorite part. No one to wait for and no one to be bothered by. I would literally snowboard down a hill, cut the whole line of people at the chairlift, because i was by myself, and go up. I loved snowboarding with my Ipod. It was the first time I had ever done it and it was like dancing in the snow. I was carving to the beats of songs and dancing around. I must have looked like a fool but its ok. So I spent a good 4 hours by myself because I literally could not find anyone else. We made it back to the bus returned our gear and headed home. I got home and opened the door and said hello to my mom and she immediately started laughing at my sunburn. And today all my teachers made comments about my sunburn, but it was completely worth it. In my business spanish all 6 of us that went snowboarding had it and every one of us had sunburn and our teacher completely loved it.
Pictures: The first picture is my attempt at being artsy on the chairlift, and to show you I wasn't lying about the extremity of the visibility.
The second is of me up in the mountains. Beautiful eh?!
The third is of the Ciderhouse. Someone getting some cider!
That is all for now!